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Shifting Trends in Modern Physics, Nobel Recognition, and the Histories That We Write

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Abstract

Since the late-nineteenth century, scientists have been labeled with disciplinary fields and scientific achievements have been identified largely with heroic individuals. Reward systems such as the highly visible Nobel Prizes have reinforced such a view of science. This paper examines long-term trends in Nobel Physics awards since 1901 and asks whether the awards have registered the increasing specialization, collaboration, and transdisciplinary research that mark the course of modern physics. A second major question is the extent to which, in turn, histories of physics since the 1960s have reflected trends in physics or in Nobel recognition. Historians of physics appear to have favored accounts of particle physics and relativity theory over other areas of physics, with biography remaining a strong tradition in the history of physics, even while institutional and social history has become significant. Concluding remarks address hierarchies of prestige in science, the accessible and emotional appeal of heroic and revolutionary accounts of science, and the perennial appeal of fundamental questions, like reductionism and emergence.

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References

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  23. Kragh, Quantum Generations (ref. 22), 431, 432, table 28.2.

  24. For example, the committees negotiated the 1904 Chemistry award to William Ramsay for inert gases and the 1904 Physics award to J. William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh, for the discovery of argon while analyzing gas densities. Crawford, “Introduction” (ref. 19), 316. Robert M. Friedman, The Politics of Excellence: Behind the Nobel Prize in Science (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2001), 182.

  25. Debye had earlier been nominated in physics, but he was blocked by one committee member. Friedman, Politics of Excellence (ref. 24), 207–9.

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  33. De Gennes’s prize is considered condensed matter physics. See Michael Rubinstein, “Polymer Physics—The Ugly Duckling Story: Will Polymer Physics Ever Become a Part of ‘Proper’ Physics?,” Journal of Polymer Science Part B: Polymer Physics 48, no. 24 (2010), 2548–51. Charpak pioneered the multiwire proportional counter, which is not based in photography.

  34. Note, however, that during 1966 to 1969, there were single-person awards to Alfred Kastler, Hans Bethe, Luis Alvarez, and Murray Gell-Mann.

  35. It was announced in September 2018 that Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the recipient of a $3 million privately funded Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The $3 million Breakthrough Prizes have been awarded since 2012 in the separate areas of Fundamental Physics, Mathematics, and Life Sciences by a founding group that includes Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Yuri Milner, and Jack Ma. See https://breakthroughprize.org/. On Jocelyn Bell Burnell, see https://breakthroughprize.org/News/45.

  36. Kragh, Quantum Generations (ref. 22), 433. The death in December 2016 of astrophysicist Vera Rubin reminded some scientists of the possibly gendered question of why the discovery of dark matter had not received Nobel recognition, in which Rubin likely would have been included. Lisa Randall, “Why Vera Rubin Deserved a Nobel,” New York Times, January 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/opinion/why-vera-rubin-deserved-a-nobel.html; Dennis Overbye, “Vera Rubin, 88, Dies; Opened Doors in Astronomy, and for Women,” New York Times, December 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/27/science/vera-rubin-astronomist-who-made-the-case-for-dark-matter-dies-at-88.html. Chemistry Nobel awards went to Marie Curie (1911) and later to her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie (1935) for researches on radioactivity, to Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1964) and Ada Yonath (2009) for X-ray crystallographic studies of molecular structure, and to Frances Arnold (2018) for her evolutionary-mutation method of producing new enzymes. Gerty T. Cori was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing one-half of the 1947 award with her husband Carl F. Cori and the other half with Bernardo Alberto Houssay.

  37. Dennis Overbye notes that at least six theorists had the idea of the Higgs boson including the still-living Tom Kibble, Carl Hagen, and Gerald Guralnik. In this same article in 2016, Overbye suggested that the LIGO collaboration should receive a group prize. Dennis Overbye, “Bob Dylan Won. But in Science, the Times They Aren’t A-Changing,” New York Times, October 31, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/science/bob-dylan-won-but-in-science-the-times-they-arent-a-changin.html.

  38. See ref. 35 and the May 2016 announcement at https://breakthroughprize.org/News/32.

  39. David L. Hull, Science as Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 312.

  40. Richard Staley, “Trajectories in the History and Historiography of Physics in the 20th Century,” History of Science 52, no. 2 (2013), 151–77, on 151.

  41. Among the many sources on Kuhn, see Robert J. Richards and Lorraine Daston, eds., Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Jürgen Renn et al., eds. Towards a History of the History of Science: 50 Years since ‘Structure’ (Berlin: Edition Open Access, 2016), 287–93, http://www.edition-open-access.de/proceedings/8/index.html.

  42. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 50th anniversary ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). As Staley has pointed out, Kuhn’s 1978 monograph Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) presented a more finally nuanced “intellectual sociology of the physics community.” Staley, “Trajectories” (ref. 40), 161.

  43. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

  44. Weinberg, “Impact of Large-Scale Science” (ref. 12).

  45. Mary Jo Nye, Blackett: Physics, War, and Politics in the 20th Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); “Re-Reading Bernal: History of Science at the Crossroads in 20th-Century Britain,” in Aurora Torealis: Studies in the History of Science and Ideas in Honor of Tore Frängsmyr, ed. Marco Beretta, Karl Grandin and Svante Lindqvist, 237–60 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2008); Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

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  47. The journal Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (HSPS) became Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences (still abbreviated HSPS) in 1986 and then Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (HSNS) in 2008.

  48. Recent book-length studies along these lines include: Robert P. Crease, Making Physics: A Biography of Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1946–1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Patrick McCray, Astronomical Ambition and the Promise of Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Peter J. Westwick, The National Labs: Science in an American System, 1947–1974 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Erik M. Conway, Atmospheric Science at NASA: A History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

  49. Lillian Hoddeson, “The Discovery of the Point-Contact Transistor,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 12, no. 1 (1981), 41–76; Krzysztof Szymborski, “The Physics of Imperfect History—A Social History,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 14, no. 2 (1984), 317–56: Per Dahl, “Kamerlingh Onnes and the Discovery of Superconductivity: The Leyden Years, 1911–1914,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 15, no. 1 (1985), 1–38; Michael Eckert, “Propaganda in Science: Sommerfeld and the Spread of the Electron Theory of Metals,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 17, no. 2 (1987), 191–234.

  50. Staley, “Trajectories” (ref. 40), 164.

  51. See Michael Eckert, “Plasmas and Solid-State Science,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 5, The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences, ed. Mary Jo Nye, 413–28 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Also, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “The Construction of a Discipline: Materials Science in the United States,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 31, no. 2 (2001), 223–48.

  52. Michael Eckert, “Plasmas and Solid State Science” (ref. 51), 427–28. On the history and epistemology of nanoscience, see Anne Marcovich and Terry Shinn, Toward a New Dimension: Exploring the Nanoscale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  53. Yves Gingras and Matthew L. Wallace, “Why It Has Become More Difficult to Predict Nobel Prize Winners: A Bibliometric Analysis of Nominees and Winners of the Chemistry and Physics Prizes (1901º2007),” arXiv, August 19, 2008, https://arxiv.org/abs/0808.2517, 10. Others suggest that the increase in the initial ages at which Nobelists’ prize-winning research initially was accomplished results from a shift toward experimental work that requires long experience and skill in drawing upon already established work. See Benjamin F. Jones and Bruce A. Weinberg, “Age Dynamics in Scientific Creativity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 47 (2011), 18910–14; also, Zoë Corbyn, “Experience Counts for Nobel Laureates,” Nature News, November 7, 2011, http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111107/full/news.2011.632.html.

  54. Kragh, Quantum Generations (ref. 22), 443.

  55. On Pauli’s remark, see Michael Eckert and Helmut Schubert, Crystals, Electrons, Transistors: From Scholar’s Study to Industrial Research, trans. Thomas Hughes (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1990), 184–85, and Egon Orowan, “Dislocations in Plasticity,” in The Sorby Centennial Symposium on the History of Metallurgy, ed. C. S. Smith (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1965), 359–76.

  56. Joseph D. Martin, “Prestige Asymmetry in American Physics: Aspirations, Applications, and the Purloined Letter Effect,” Science in Context 30, no. 4 (2017), 475–506, on 488. Martin’s book Solid State Insurrection: How the Science of Substance Made American Physics Matter (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) is a new history of the field.

  57. Galison, “The Collective Author” (ref. 13), 329.

  58. The Einstein Papers Project: The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, published in print by Princeton University Press. Volume 15 appeared in April 2018, and the total number of volumes is expected to be around thirty. See http://www.einstein.caltech.edu/what/index.html.

  59. My July 2018 analysis of Amazon.com lists for “biographies and memoirs” resulted in 430 entries for Einstein, 315 for Newton, 297 for Galileo, 258 for Stephen Hawking, 126 for Marie Curie (many aimed at young readers), 59 for Robert Oppenheimer, 51 for Richard Feynman, 30 for Niels Bohr, 21 for Werner Heisenberg, and 6 for Emilio Segrè. Given the changing nature of the Amazon.com website, this count surely cannot be replicated. Recent notable biographies or memoirs of physicists include: Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin, The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi (New York: Henry Holt, 2016); David Schwartz, The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Life and Times of Enrico Fermi (New York: Basic, 2017); and Paul Halpern, The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality (New York: Basic, 2017). Autobiographical accounts include Freeman Dyson, Makers of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters (New York: Liveright, 2018), and Luis W. Alvarez’s Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (1987; Lexington: Plunkett Lake Press, 2017). All of these biographical or autobiographical subjects are associated with particle physics or relativity.

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  64. Michel Foucault dates the cult of the solitary author to the seventeenth century. Michael Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari, 141–60 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 115; Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede, Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 79, 8–81, 88.

  65. Harriet Zuckerman, “Patterns of Name Ordering Among Authors of Scientific Papers: A Study of Social Symbolism and Its Ambiguity,” American Journal of Sociology 74, no. 3 (1968), 276–91, on 289.

  66. Crease and Westfall write that materials science and nanoscience researchers rely on a more decentralized organizational structure of using large machines in concert with smaller ones in order to piece together mosaics of properties, in contrast to the more centralized research of high energy and nuclear physicists that adds pieces to a single, coherent puzzle. Robert P. Crease and Catherine Westfall, “The New Big Science,” Physics Today 69, no. 5 (2016), 30–36, esp. 30, 34. Also, W. Patrick McCray, “Will Small Be Beautiful? Making Policies for Our Nanotech Future,” History and Technology 21, no. 2 (2005), 177–203.

  67. On the erosion of the technology versus science distinction following the Second World War and the possibility of distinguishing recent science from technoscience, see Alan J. Rocke, “Theory versus Practice in German Chemistry: Erlenmeyer beyond the Flask,” Isis 109, no. 2 (2018), 254–75, on 269–71. Also, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “Matters of Interest: The Objects of Research in Science and Technoscience,” Journal of the General Philosophy of Science 42, no. 2 (2011), 365–83.

  68. Elizabeth Gibney, “What the Nobels Are—and Aren’t—Doing to Encourage Diversity,” Nature News, September 28, 2018, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06879-z.

  69. Philip W. Anderson, “More Is Different,” Science 177, no. 4047 (1972), 393–96; Anderson, More Is Different: Notes (ref. 6), 90.

  70. Michael Stone, “Modeling Quantum Behavior in Condensed Matter,” Physics Today 71, no. 6 (2018), 57—a review of Ramamurti Shankar, Quantum Field Theory and Condensed Matter: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). On the research conferences, see https://www.grc.org/correlated-electron-systems-grs-conference/2018/. International Gordon Research Conferences have been meeting since 1931 in order to address what is considered frontier research.

  71. Silvan S. Schweber, “Physics, Community and the Crisis in Physical Theory,” Physics Today 46, no. 11 (1993), 34–40, on 34. See the discussion in Elena Castellani, “Reductionism, Emergence, and Effective Field Theories,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 33, no. 2 (2002), 251–67.

  72. Schweber, “Physics, Community and the Crisis” (ref. 71), 38–39.

  73. For example, see Michael Polanyi, “The Value of the Inexact,” Philosophy of Science 3, no. 2 (1936), 233–34; Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 394.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is a revision of my “Abraham Pais Prize Lecture: Shifting Problems and Boundaries in the History of Modern Physics,” which is posted at the online website of the APS March Meeting 2017, Bulletin of the American Physical Society62, no. 4 (2017), https://absuploads.aps.org/presentation.cfm?pid=13428, and of my longer Lyne Starling Trimble Science Heritage Public Lecture, September 12, 2018, at the American Institute of Physics. I thank Henri Jansen and Kenneth Krane for comments on the first draft of the Pais Prize Lecture, and Bretislav Friedrich for suggestions on the Trimble Lecture text, along with Robert Nye and Lesley Nye for general critiques. I am grateful for perceptive questions brought up at the AIP lecture from Gregory Good, Lindley Darden, Will Thomas, Andrew Brown, and others, and I am indebted to Joseph D. Martin and Richard Staley for their encouragement and for editorial comments.

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Mary Jo Nye is the Horning Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History emerita at Oregon State University. Her books include Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science (Chicago, 2011), Blackett: Physics, War, and Politics in the 20th Century (Harvard, 2004), and Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800–1940 (Harvard, 1999).

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Nye, M.J. Shifting Trends in Modern Physics, Nobel Recognition, and the Histories That We Write. Phys. Perspect. 21, 3–22 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-019-00234-z

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